Project description

A core, implicit assumption, in the field of law is that people know the law – at least, not knowing the law is not seen as a valid excuse for breaking it. Nevertheless, from a behavioral perspective, the question is how people can obey the law if they do not know its rules. This project aims to illuminate these questions. Firstly, it will bring together existing empirical evidence about whether people know the law, drawing on studies on both laypersons and experts. Second, the project aims to study how legal rules move from enforcement agencies into regulated organizations, and finally arrive at individual regulated actors. For this purpose, the project will rely on ethnographic methods. And third, the project will examine how better knowledge and behavioral change can be achieved through simplification of rules or communication. To answer this question, the project will conduct experiments.

This project is a collaboration between Benjamin van Rooij, Noor de Bruijn, Shuyu Huang (all C-LAB), Li Na (Yunnan University, legal anthropology), Sharon Oded (Erasmus School of Law), Adam Fine (Arizona State University, criminology, psychology), Nils Köbis (School of Economics and Business, Amsterdam University, behavioral economics).

Relevant publications and works in progress:

• Li, Na, and Benjamin Van Rooij. "Compliance without Process: Lessons About the Transmission and Competition of Legal, Organizational, and Personal Rules."  (draft paper in progress)).
• van Rooij, Benjamin. "Do People Know the Law? Empirical Evidence About Legal Knowledge and Its Implications for Compliance." In Cambridge Handbook on Compliance, edited by Benjamin van Rooij and D. Daniel Sokol. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020 (forthcoming).